Ships, boats and other watercraft are widely-used by many people for transportation, fishing, vacation, and recreation. Improvement of technology and relatively low cost, especially with regard to passenger cruise ships, have led to an increase in the number of cruise ships transporting vacationers to various locales around the globe.
Safety continues to be an important issue for cruise vacation providers. Yet, every year passengers and crew members on various sea vessels fall overboard and are lost due to drowning and/or prolonged exposure to harsh elements/conditions. The individual causes of people falling overboard range from rough seas to mere accidents. If a witness isn't nearby to report an overboard passenger, there is a strong likelihood that the disappearance of the person will not be noticed in time to locate and rescue the person. Thus, by the time rescue operations are initiated, the overboard individual may have drowned or been swept away a great distance by moving currents. Cruise ships and other boats are often fitted out with life boats and life rings. However, even if the fall overboard of a passenger is witnessed, it may still be difficult to effect the proper dispatch of the rescue device to the passenger, given the movement of the seas and the wake created by the vessel. This is especially true of unmanned rescue devices, such as life vests or life rings thrown overboard for retrieval by the victim, especially if the victim is injured or otherwise rendered incapacitated due to his/her fall overboard.
More often than not, a passenger falling overboard goes unnoticed, and no alarm is raised until the passenger is deemed to have gone missing. By the time this occurs, the ship may be miles away from the overboard passenger, and the likelihood of rescue could be very low. Thus, there is a need, unfulfilled in the prior art, for automatically alerting crew members of a ship of the approximate location of an overboard passenger, and automatically dispatching a homing rescue device to such a location.